The Fresh (and Beachy!) Way to Decorate With Antiques

Family memories and mementos jump-start the reinvention of a Gulf Coast beach house for three generations — and many more to come.

MIMI READ: This house is an ode to old wicker and worn wood.

TAMMY CONNOR: A home is to help you live in a certain way. The idea of this house is to live at the beach with sand on your feet, the feel of the breeze, and the smell of the ocean. So it's all about the setting. My client spends as much time here as she can carve out of her busy city life. She comes down with her husband, grown children, and grandchildren. It's her happy place.

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Where is it?

Near Seaside, Florida. It faces a road, but you'd never notice it because it's so simple. It looks and feels like an old beach cottage, but it's only three years old and LEED certified, with solar panels on the roof. Of all the clients I've worked with, this one's the most ecologically conscious and responsible. She'd grown up spending summers at her parents' beach house, which sat on this same footprint. She loves this beach and wanted to tread as lightly as she could.

Mali Azima

She tore down her parents' house?

She had to. It had been through several hurricanes and couldn't be saved. So she wanted to build something that produced the same feelings in her. We didn't put anything in it that didn't have some kind of memory or familiarity, or that didn't move her in the way of the beach she's always known.

How did you download her memories?

The old-fashioned way. The first night we were down there, she made us a shrimp boil and sat and told stories. Her mother and father found this beach 60 years ago when they were not actually looking for beach property. They bought a lot for $5,000 and built a concrete-block home. Every year on the first of June, her mother, brothers, sisters, the nanny, the parakeet, and the dog got in the station wagon, drove several hours to the beach, and stayed all summer. Their father would come nearly every weekend. The mother forbade TV, so they played games all day. The area was completely undiscovered and fabulous back then — the nearest grocery store was a long drive away. The Gulf was teeming with blue crabs, and this wonderful woman who cooked for them would make crab jambalaya. They rode a Jeep on the dunes. There were wild pigs running around the yard at night, and her brothers would try to catch them.

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But to translate someone's memories into furnishings — how do you do that?

We used a lot of antiques, a lot of natural and handmade things with texture. In the living room, the coffee table is pine. Nothing formal about it — just really pretty wood. I added a plain glass jug on it, and a glass buoy. Simple, easy shapes. I love bringing in glass at the beach because light pours in and plays off it.

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What about the color palette?

White walls, lots of different wood tones, a few wisps of murky blue and sea-glass green. This house sits right on the beach, and we didn't want to compete: With so many windows, the water just jumps inside.

What are the rules of mixing wicker? You've thrown antique pieces together on the screened porch.

If it were all the same, it would look stiff and staged. But we painted it all the same color — a deep ocean blue — which ties the pieces together and also connects the porch to the sea beyond.

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You've made a surprisingly beautiful space out of the long upstairs hallway.

Coming off this hallway are five bedrooms lined up like cabins in an old fishing camp, so I pulled that mood into everything. I hung a kayak frame upside down from the ceiling. Its old paint color is fantastic — a weathered-green patina, the kind you can't fake. I found lamps made out of old amethyst-glass wasp catchers — a strangely modern form, and it has to do with nature. Above the table are family photos and newspaper clippings from the last 40 years — it's a family memory wall. To frame everything, I went to antiques shops and bought $5 pictures, just for the frames. The wall looks like it grew over time.

You must ascribe a certain romance to reading. How else to explain those poetic bedside lamps with the cord switches?

That's true. I do love reading and always dream of doing more of it. In one of the bedrooms, we adapted candle lanterns as sconces and wall-mounted them with those switches. When you turn them off, it's back to old-cabin days. You almost feel like you're blowing out a candle.

What about the spools on the wall above the twin beds — so quirky and engaging.

We were at an antiques market, the client and I, and we saw all these vintage spools of thread piled in a glass canister. I just stopped and stared at them. The colors captured me.

Mali Azima

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What were your plans for them?

None, really. I thought we could throw them in a bowl if nothing else. The spools stayed in a brown bag for months. At the installation, I finally opened the bag and said, "Oh!" I'd completely forgotten them. I started playing around, made a pattern with them on the floor. Some of the spools were unwound a bit and I didn't bother to rewind them, just left the threads hanging down. Then I nailed them to the wall. It turned out to be one of my favorite parts of the house.

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